Stars For A Day

Country Legends Just Aren`t What They Used To Be

November 01, 1987|By Jack Hurst, Country music writer.

People close to Randy Travis, the hottest name in country music, reportedly prayed their man wouldn`t win the Country Music Association`s pinnacle Entertainer of the Year title at the CMA`s recent annual awards ceremonies.

If you`re thinking Travis, who won three other 1987 CMA awards, is surrounded by traitors, think again. Missing out on the entertainer crown was almost certainly in the young Warner Bros. artist`s best interest.

``If I had been in Travis` camp, I would have been worried,`` agrees rival RCA Records` Nashville boss Joe Galante.

Why? Because had Travis added that title to the many others he has captured this year and last, he might have been perceived-after just two years on the national scene-to be peaking.

This drives home a sobering fact increasingly nagging country music businessmen: Country stardom, which used to be considered a lifetime thing, is developing an imposing mortality rate.

``Where the average star used to last 15 years, now it`s probably more like five,`` says Jerry Bradley, head of new 16th Avenue Records and formerly boss at Galante`s RCA.

``You can name a lot of exceptions, of course. You still have people like Charley Pride and Conway Twitty and Alabama, who are still around after a lot more than five years. But an awful lot of others are gone.``

Galante and CBS Records` Nashville chief Rick Blackburn think along the same lines as Bradley. Galante says that whereas a legendary performer`s career used to be able to last from 10 to 20 years, now it ``might last 5 to 10.

``I think at the high side now we`re going to be looking at 10 years, and that would be the exception,`` Galante adds. ``I think most people will last five to seven.``

The trend toward career-shrinkage is even affecting the country superstars, Blackburn says.

``The pop superstar tends to be up and down, whereas the country superstar has more of a glide,`` the CBS executive says. ``But the glide appears to be shortening. Willie Nelson has had about a 12-year one, Kenny Rogers about 10 and Alabama seven or eight.

``Travis is at the superstar level now, no question, but in the last few years, we haven`t developed enough others,``says Blackburn.

How long the 28-year-old Travis, who clearly has a style and appeal reminiscent of such legends as Merle Haggard, George Jones and Johnny Cash, will last is difficult to predict.

``The unknown in this thing,`` Galante says, ``is that you have younger people starting off in this business now. The question is whether they will remain stars or whether we now have an audience that says, `I`ve had enough of his or her albums. I want to move on to the next one.` ``

Younger stars, Galante notes, bring in a younger audience, which adds another volatile element to the prediction process: Young people`s tastes often change.

Blackburn, meanwhile, says it`s becoming harder to develop superstars like Travis because of a couple of other unstable elements:

- The way the prominent trade magazines` country hit charts` No. 1 position has become a revolving door, unrealistically cycling almost every No. 1 single into and out of the spot in just one week.

- The widespread radio practice of playing a lot of consecutive records without interruption by even an announcement of who they were by, making it difficult for listeners to associate new artists` names and faces with their music.

The only good thing Blackburn can find in playing several records in a row-from playlists that are appallingly short-is that it may soon spawn a radio revolution like that of pop in the `60s, when innovative ``underground`` programmers started giving listeners much more diversity, ignoring charted singles in favor of album cuts.

A good thing about having so many records reach the No. 1 position, Blackburn notes, is obviously that record companies and artists can claim more No. 1 records in their publicity kits; the bad thing is that these records are cycled so quickly the public can`t remember most of them long enough to get to a record store and buy them.

``There`s no way you can have 50 records that are truly No. 1 in a year,`` contends Charlie Douglas, host of the widely syndicated Music Country Radio Network and one of the industry`s more objective observers.

``In 1952, Hank Snow`s `I`m Movin` On` was No. 1 for 27 weeks. Now they shoot off rockets if they have a record that stays No. 1 for two weeks. But there weren`t nearly as many country radio stations or country stars then.

``Our problem is that we`ve got a 25-star business with 500 people trying to be stars in it-and a 750-station radio business with 2,200 stations trying to operate in it.``

Douglas` point is that it`s harder to develop superstars when there are legions of stars competing for the public`s attention-and when there are so many avenues to the public`s eyes and ears that it`s impossible to occupy all of them.